The shadows are growing longer now as the sun drops toward the Divide, and it was a beautiful day today. It started out with clouds and ice on the deck and evolved through virga mixed with sun into a puffy cloud day with spring colors everywhere. The green is starting to pop on the plains, thanks to the last few days of wetness.
I love the word "virga". It describes incomplete rainfall, rainfall that emerges from the clouds and doesn't make it to the ground. You can see it as dark vertical streaks in the sky below cumulus clouds, the streaks ending well up in the air. Virga is a cue to flyers to avoid the area nearby and underneath as there are sharp downdrafts associated with the rainfall's emergence from the cloud.
I found myself this morning in a Schweizer 300C, call sign N-299RJ or "helicopter two niner niner romeo juliet", to play on the breezes. The weather briefer told me there were substantial winds at altitude and that we would be in and out of turbulence today. I took off from Jefferson County Airport in Broomfield, Colorado, with a plan to fly the few miles to Boulder Municipal Airport and there to do some autorotations practice. Jeffco was just too busy with several helicopters underway and intermingled with the weekend Cessnas and corporate jets.
As we got above 1000 feet the unstable atmosphere was very noticeable. The biggest challenge today was to fly with the same power settings for more than a few seconds and still maintain altitude and airspeed. Just flying to Boulder was a challenge - Romeo Juliet wanted to soar higher and higher, and I fought to keep our altitude below the fixed wing air traffic levels. My job as a helicopter pilot is to avoid the normal flow of traffic, in other words to stay the heck out of other people's way.
We were all over the map - I spent 80% of my focus working on descending, because every time my attention wandered at all I would find suddenly I had gained another thousand feet or so! Updrafts everywhere, and the occasional virga with big, cold downdrafts just to keep me awake. Sunny ground interspersed with cumulus clouds, both conditions powerful and opposite in their impact on the winds.
As we came closer to Boulder, we saw the airport with clouds and virga closing in. We also saw high wind signatures on reservoirs nearby - the wind was roaring directly out of the north, pretty much a direct crosswind to the runway. Heck with that, we'll just go on to Longmont's Vance Brand Airport and do our practice work there. It was another five minutes' flight to reach Longmont and start our approach.
"Longmont traffic, helicopter two niner niner romeo juliet 4 miles southeast of the airport at 6500 feet, inbound for runway two niner, remaining in the pattern for helicopter practice, Longmont." There's no control tower here, and making the radio call lets other aircraft know we're coming in. Sure enough, a quick reply: "helicopter traffic be advised jumpers in the area." Longmont hosts a sky diving school, with a King Air to take folks up so they can jump out of the airplane and float back down to an area south of the runway. OK, I draw the line at this - I much prefer to remain in the aircraft at all times! I have flown around the jumpers here many times in the past, so I didn't hesitate on my approach.
We came in on a steep approach to hover over the numbers "29" at the near end of the runway, the mountains in front of us on our 290-degree approach angle. Holding the hover, the aircraft wanted to turn right into the wind - the stiff crosswind was noticeable. After a brief instruments check for the aircraft's health and adequate fuel, I nudged the cyclic gently forward to initiate take off. I did my radio call to take off toward the west and stay in the airport's traffic pattern. As we accelerated forward through ETL (the airspeed at which the helicopter begins flying out of its own rotor wash is called effective translational lift), I noticed a colorful canopy high in the sky to my left, south of the runway. Then I noticed a whole bunch more canopies, all brightly colored, ahead and above me in the sky. Oops, they're coming down right on top of me!
From my current halfway point on the runway I initiated a sharp right turn out to the north, flying low, fast and into the wind. "Longmont traffic helicopter niner romeo juliet departing the airport to the north avoiding the jumpers, Longmont." So much for doing helicopter practice here: the wind was crosswise and it was stirring the jumpers so I couldn't predict where they might be, and that made me way too uncomfortable. Anyway, it was another strong crosswind and autorotations just weren't happening here today. As I put the airport farther behind me I put the nose up and ascended out at 41 knots, the Schweizer's best rate of climb.
I turned out to the east and decided to buzz our office, see whether Tom came in to FedEx that proposal out. His car wasn't in the lot - I bet he'd long ago come and gone, early bird that he is. From there I flew toward my original helicopter birthplace, Tim's house and his company, Falcon Helicopters, southeast of our office. Falcon is the place where I started flying in 2000, where I achieved my proudest accomplishment to that date, my private pilot rating. Today as a more experienced commercial-rated pilot I practiced a turn around Tim's house in case he was looking. I hope he wasn't looking because my performance was terrible.
It is difficult to make a regular circle in high winds, as the helicopter behaves very differently depending on where the wind is. A good pilot makes this happen right regardless of the wind, manipulating power and speed to compensate for the uneven conditions, but my "circle" looked more like a tightly-strung bow, with a straight slanty line as I tried to turn through and away from the wind, until I turned far enough to power my way through a tight curve back to my starting place. Meanwhile, the wind had pushed me way south of where I wanted to be...arghh. I hope no one saw this one, especially my former teacher!
I flew back toward Jeffco and asked the tower air traffic controller if we could use taxiway Delta for helicopter practice. She was not in a good mood today, although she is usually really nice. She gave me some instructions that seemed contradictory, first to fly to Marshall Lake, west of the airport, and then she said to join the downwind leg of left traffic for taxiway Delta, which is a southerly path. I should have asked her for clarification right away, but instead I drifted toward the downwind direction she had described, a little uncertain. I had not yet crossed the path of the traffic departing the airport, and she told me sharply to descend (darn, my fault, today this helicopter is just soaring whenever I lose focus on altitude) and to keep flying toward the lake. Her instructions on how to get to Delta were spoken slowly and clearly, as though I might have trouble understanding English.
Message to self: don't take on her stress, just don't. When I fly, I've learned to talk through things out loud, speaking all of my flight-relevant thoughts whether I'm by myself or with someone else. Whether it's an instrument check or my next flight intention, it makes my thoughts real and makes it easier for me to confirm that I've taken care of things as I should. I essentially can follow my own intructions. So I followed my instructions to myself here and didn't take on her stress. I thanked her, repeated her instructions and followed them to the letter.
Dang, unbelievable. Even though there wasn't a lot of traffic at Jeffco as there had been earlier, there was a stiff crosswind on the taxiway. I said, "we aren't doing any autos today." OK, fine, we have lemons, we'll do lemonade. It was a very productive practice. Each time I took off I called the tower "Jeffco tower helicopter niner romeo juliet on the go", she replied with "helicopter niner romeo juliet cleared for the option Delta taxiway", and I said "helicopter niner romeo juliet cleared for the option, Delta." We were back in synch with each other, the familiar and comforting dialogue between pilot and protector.
I spent the rest of my flight doing normal, steep and runon landings, all with a stiff crosswind. It took a big right-cyclic move to hold the aircraft straight on the runway as I completed a couple very shallow approaches and ran the helicopter on to the runway at 30 knots, skids scraping along as I slowly lowered the collective, increasing the friction and gradually slowing us to a stop.
I practiced hovering 360 degree pedal turns, where I would turn my tail through the wind and prevent the aircraft from whipping around like a wind gage, keeping the turn controlled and smooth and not moving away from my pivot point. Much better than the turn around a point up high, it made me feel more competent again. Yeah!
Maximum performance takeoffs in a helicopter are vertical. Usually we take off like an airplane, making a small forward input on the cyclic that initiates hovering forward through ETL and then climbing out smoothly. But after all, we're a helicopter and we don't need no stinkin' runway, so we practice the vertical takeoffs from the runway, pretending there are trees or buildings around us that prevent that graceful normal departure. In this the wind is our friend. It blows away the turbulence our rotors create so we're already flying without moving. When we pull up on the collective, the aircraft soars straight up like a raven on an updraft, powerful and free. Today it felt as though we could keep climbing forever straight up.
But the earth was calling me back. The helicopter was scheduled to fly with another pilot in a short time, we were down to 8 gallons of gas, and it was time to request a return to our ramp, just across the main runway. I called the tower and asked permission to return. She was back in her other mood; something was wrong for her today. She asked me to fly all the way around the departing runway, rather than across the middle of it into the wind, and then she cleared me to land on runway two zero. "Two zero" means that the landing aircraft will land toward the southwest, at a 200 degree angle from north. This meant I would be landing with a substantial tailwind, a completely unacceptable situation from a safety standpoint and the opposite of normal behavior.
As a pilot it is my job to make the final decisions about what is safe. I asked her for clarification - did she really want me to fly around the departure end of the main runway, and she said yes in that sharp, slow-talking way, as though I were really recalcitrant. I reminded myself about the separation between her mood and mine. I flew around the end of the runway as she asked and then I flew downwind along the main runway and then through the hangars nearby to pull a sharp, steep descent into the wind, landing directly on the numbers "20" at the end of the runway but facing the northeast, or 20 degrees rather than 200. I switched the radio to the ground control radio frequency and requested a return from the runway to the ramp.
Oh boy, working the ground channel was the lady everyone thinks is a less than competent controller. She seems easily confused and she reacts to her confusion by talking more, something that frustrates pilots totally. No one can get a word in edgewise to get their business done, and she gets irritated because everyone else is irritated, and likely also because she senses her inadequacy. The more traffic, the worse it is. She has nevertheless been a controller at Jeffco for years now, and we've all gotten used to her style. I had no trouble following her instructions back to the ramp, about 100 feet from where I'd settled into a hover over the numbers.
My lessons today:
1) The lemons-lemonade thing. I set out to work on autorotations today, and I did not do even one. Yet I had a wonderful day flying in weather both challenging and beautiful, soaring above the verdant spring landscape of the great plains, the white-capped Rockies to the west, the broken clouds and virga creating flight challenges every second.
2) No arrogance. Whatever level of competency I think I may have achieved, I can be clumsy and incompetent on a moment's notice; just change something that's been the same for a while and I revert back to my student mode of trying to attain a performance level that seems totally out of reach. I will always be a student in the real world of life-long learning, and the wind will always be my teacher in flying.
3) No arrogance. I am less competent and less experienced than any of those grumpy, confused and confusing air traffic controllers. My own mistakes today at least matched theirs, and normally would exceed theirs. I had a good day because things came out right in the end - we landed shiny side up and walked away from the aircraft with both unscathed, a pilot's classic definition of a good day.
An excellent day, totally. Thanks for letting me share it with you. I'll explain autorotations some other time, when I actually get to do them.
